Who are these people? They talk about us and write about us, sometimes behind our backs. They tend to come here from somewhere else, strangers in a strange city, charged with telling the outside world who we are and how we live. Often, the Chicago they reveal is an embarrassment of bitching and backbiting, mudslinging and mayhem.
They tell their stories on the front pages of newspapers that, with a couple of exceptions, we almost never see and in national newsmagazines and electronic newscasts we scarcely can avoid. The images we glimpse of ourselves through their eyes sometimes startle us. Do we really look like that?
And yet, though they are distressed by the dark side of Chicago`s politics, race relations, and weather, they also are impressed with our lakefront, our architecture and culture, our ethnic diversity, our die-hard sports fans, our resilience as a people. They share those stories, too, with the world.
They are the national correspondents assigned to the Midwest, based in Chicago. In the pages that follow, the men and women who tell the world about Our Town tell us what they, as private individuals, think about Chicago. In doing so, they tell us a bit about themselves as well.
FRANK MAIER, MIDWEST BUREAU CHIEF, NEWSWEEK
Not many of the national correspondents currently posted here got to cover the waning years of Mayor Daley`s reign. Maier did, and one of his articles became a Newsweek cover story in 1971. Headlined ”How To Run a City,” the article, Maier recalls, was ”the first by a national publication after the 1968 Democratic National Convention that really gave a fair shake to Richard Daley. That`s a story I felt good about.”
Maier came to Chicago in 1966 from newspaper jobs in Rockford and Elgin, and worked for the Chicago Daily News until he joined Newsweek here in 1970. He became Midwest bureau chief the following year. His office looks south over Grant Park from the 79th floor of the Standard Oil Building. From Chicago, he and three other Newsweek correspondents cover 11 states.
”It`s a nice job. I love this territory. It`s a great news territory. We do big-city and political pieces as well as small-town-America-typ e stories. I like the small-town stories because you can humanize them a lot more and also because they`re fresh–nobody`s trampled the weeds before you. There`s still a certain amount of fun to being a reporter in Chicago itself, but it`s a very competitive town and politics is so overcovered it`s harder to get something real fresh, so I don`t get as much fun out of it anymore.
”For Newsweek, I think our bureau is used as a sounding board of what`s happening in the country. As Chicagoans we`re not exactly on the cutting edge of change here, but quite often we get a better handle on things because we`re somewhat insulated from the real highs and lows of enthusiasm.
”We still have to fight the old `hog butcher to the world` image. We had one writer in New York, years ago, who wrote about `the smell from the stockyards wafting over the city.` It was a little color he threw in, but the stockyards had disappeared many years before. It`s that sort of thing we have to guard against.”
ANN RUBENSTEIN, CORRESPONDENT, NBC NETWORK NEWS
Rubenstein joined NBC last September after a five-year stint as a local reporter for CBS affiliate WCCO-TV in St. Paul-Minneapolis. Working from the Merchandise Mart, she and four other NBC correspondents cover a 14-state territory.
”Chicago is three things: Politics, cops and robbers, and history. Chicago is rough, tough, and proud, compared to the Twin Cities, where it`s so calm, so nonviolent, so pristine, and so peaceful. But Chicago`s the best place on Earth to its people, who have a kind of blind love for their city. That`s fun to see.
”But the racism in this city is almost contrary to the image I think Chicago wants for itself. It`s a real dark spot on this city`s character.
”I haven`t found Chicago to be an overly friendly city. It`s as if you have to prove yourself before arms are opened, both personally and
professionally. Nobody`s quick to do you any favors. It`s not that kind of place. I have not been mistreated nor have I been treated with cruel brashness –nothing like New York–but I notice the difference from Minneapolis.
”Yet f the theater, the restaurants. But even if you just took a walk around the city on a pretty day, it`s enough to make you love Chicago. You have the big-city feel and the big-city life, but it`s livable.”
PAUL FRANCUCH, MIDWEST BUREAU CHIEF, VOICE OF AMERICA
Francuch (pronounced ”Franchuck”) came to Chicago four years ago from Washington. He has been with VOA 10 years. He shares his bureau office in the Dirksen Federal Building with another correspondent, who broadcasts abroad in Lithuanian as well as in English. Their territory extends from the Ohio River north and west through the Dakotas. About a third of the hundred reports they did last year were about Chicago.
”Our audience is the entire world. We broadcast in 43 foreign languages. Most of our listeners are non-English-speaking, although some of our foreign listeners will tune in to the English-language broadcasts as well. The stuff we do here in English is completely scripted before going to the news division in Washington, and the texts of our reports are run on an internal wire to all of our language services. They have the option of using a full story or a rewritten short version. If the language services feel there`s enough interest in a story out of Chicago, they`ll translate it and run the whole thing.
”The African service was quite interested in the election of Harold Washington. News of the Polish community here and its ties to relatives and events in Poland is used frequently, not only by our Polish service but by our Soviet and Eastern European services as well. There`s not too much interest in stories about local crime. Gang-warfare stories may be used by the English- language service, but seldom by the foreign services because the latter group generally devotes its efforts to what`s happening in their parts of the world. ”Still, I think the image is pretty prevalent abroad of Chicago as a rough-and-tumble sort of place, almost a Wild West place. The ghost of Al Capone lives in the minds of many around the world. But we do get requests for features on the arts and culture in Chicago. We`ve also looked at some of the problems: Where the poor spend the holidays, coping with the problems of being alone, the school strike, the animosities between racial and ethnic groups in the city. We`ve also done a few background reports on the `council wars,` but it`s so baffling to explain Chicago politics to an international audience.”
MICHAEL BOSC, MIDWEST BUREAU CHIEF, U.S. NEWS & WORLD REPORT
Bosc has been in Chicago two years. Previously, he worked as a reporter and editor in Minneapolis and Indiana. His wood-paneled office looks east from the Tribune Tower. He and another correspondent cover nine states for the Washington-based newsmagazine. His reports are often spliced into those of others from around the country. ”It`s group journalism,” he says, which he finds frustrating because so little of his work gets used.
Several USN&WR editors have spent time in the Chicago bureau, which Bosc says helps defuse potential Eastern biases and misconceptions about the city. ”Whenever there`s a roundup, the reaction is, `Chicago`s too important to leave out.`
”Chicago is a good news town, a rough-and-tumble city. Politics, the amount of heavy industry, the financial district, agriculture–all that makes this a very newsworthy town. I grew up in New York, where there`s a lot of the same kind of diversity, excitement, the same hustle and lack of time to be polite. Minneapolis is more genteel than Chicago, which seems very East Coast to me.
”In Chicago, what we`re witnessing is the death of the Democratic political machine. Most other cities have long passed that political godfather era. This is a stark contrast to Minneapolis, which was the dullest damned city to cover. It was squeaky clean. There was a mini-expose because some alderman had gotten free parking at a football game; he should`ve paid two bucks but didn`t. In Chicago that would be laughable. Who would bother to report a $2 or $10 or $100 bribe to an alderman?”
JACKI LYDEN, MIDWEST CORRESPONDENT, NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO
Lyden lived in Wisconsin, Indiana, and Cambridge, England, before coming to Chicago in 1975. She also spent some time touring with a rodeo, wanting to ”have an adventure, document it for Life Magazine, and become an overnight sensation.” It didn`t turn out that way: ”I was much too middle-class to be anything but shocked by that life. And I was terribly frightened of living in a big city, but coming to Chicago was the best and biggest education I ever had–better than college, better than Cambridge.” After living in Uptown, she coauthored a photographic history of the neighborhood, then went through a succession of jobs before becoming the ”Traffic Queen of WIND.” Then she got into radio newswriting, producing, and reporting at WIND and WKQX. A freelance piece on the use of deadly force by the Chicago police led to a job with NPR, for which she has been a reporter for four years, covering the Midwest with several stringers.
”Part of the charm and the problem of Chicago is its very strong community history. That`s good in terms of giving people a sense of identity, bad in terms of making it hard for them to learn to do things differently, to keep moving forward. Small towns in Connecticut have done a better job of attracting new industry than Chicago. I also think the mayor doesn`t pay enough attention to the fact that a lot of people are looking at him from around the country. He should be more accessible to those of us reporting to audiences beyond Chicago.
”I love New York and San Francisco, but those communities don`t offer me the same kind of journalism I can do in the Midwest. This is such an important area, balancing both Coasts. We`ve done the stories that everybody does–the
`council wars,` the world`s fair–but I also try to look for the things that reflect the humanity of the Midwest.
”The editors want to know what keeps everything humming here. It may not necessarily be a national story, but it may be critical to this community. They also want to know what the Midwest thinks of national trends, how Chicago looks at the rest of the country. If there`s a piece of major legislation coming out of Washington, they want to know what the Midwesterner thinks of that. That`s one reason for having field offices–so we sound national, so our news doesn`t all come out of the East, so our stories can be human, with sounds and voices from places other than Washington.
”Our stories, too, are for a national audience. I`m not trying to interpret Chicago for just one other community. In that sense we differ from the Washington Post or the Philadelphia Inquirer and we`re more like Time magazine or the Wall Street Journal. But this job is also quite different from that of a print or even a TV reporter. On radio I`m working with language and sound, and much of the soul and vitality of the Midwest works beautifully on the air.”
